Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

We also found many times missing libraries, or found libraries which are incomplete, or unmaintained or just not well documented. Just compare the total amount of libraries in Hex, vs the total amount of libraries in rubygems. Somebody will say "but Elixir libraries are higher quality so we need less, etc,etc" as if there were not good developers in the ruby world and every elixir developer were a rockstar.

Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. There is a plugin but last time I tried it, it was even worse than the VSCode plugin.

Also, I've read some comments where people mention "we don't need redis", "we don't need workers" everything is so much easier. That was our thinking at first. But then you realize on deployments you will lose your cache, or your background jobs, etc. So you have to persist them either in mnesia or in the database. At that point you're just reinventing your crappy undocumented and untested version of delayed_job.

Most of what you get from elixir in terms of redundancy, high availability, etc you can have that anyway from kubernetes, heroku or any PaaS.... you will need more than 1 server anyway, so...

Liveview sounds amazing until you try to use it in the real world. The most minimum latency kills the experience.

In the end, we are back to Rails and much happier. Specially now we are using all the hotwire stuff. Not fancy, and not fashionable though.

I would also say that the "library" one is basically valid for every language. In general is always a good thing to spend some time analyzing the possibilities before importing an external lib into your application.

Previously I wrote Scala for a few years, then RoR for a few years before that, following about a decade of Perl. I recommend you try Elixir.

Anyone complaining about a talent pool is focusing too hard on prior Elixir experience. We hire backend engineers and teach them Elixir. This has worked out great so far, especially now that we're a fully remote business and are no longer as constrained by geography.

Five years ago I spent time learning Elixir on the side thinking I was investing in an upcoming technology that would pay off for me financially. I eventually built some services in Elixir at work and really enjoyed it. They performed well but the language didn’t catch on with the rest of the team.

However, five years later the mainstream languages (Ruby, Go) are still paying more. I still get recruiter messages for Elixir jobs offering less than market value but I haven’t used the language in over a year.

The popular packages are top-notch, but as others have said - there might be issues finding what you need. My personal experience seems to be the opposite though - when going from Elixir to Ruby, it turned out that some of the gems were really, really far from perfect.

In terms of deployment, my take is that the community has finally figured it out. Elixir is a compiled language, so there is a build-time configuration and runtime configuration and I think it's best to keep the two separate, which is now well supported by the new runtime config (Elixir >= 1.11). Mix releases + runtime.exs + Docker works for me perfectly.

If you're coming from RoR, you'll be able to pick up Phoenix really quickly. It draws a pretty clear line between your web layer and your business/app layer though. Writing controllers and views should be similar, but I'd suggest spending some time on Ecto - it's quite different from ActiveRecord (in a good way, IMO).

One thing I'm missing in Elixir is optional static typing akin of TypeScript, but that's not coming anywhere soon. Other than that, no regrets.

I got introduced to Elixir in 2015 and was trying to work with it full-time since then. I was able to get a full-time Elixir job and I'm really happy about that. If you're looking for opportunities, I'd suggest attending ElixirConf or ElixirConf EU - last year I got 5 interesting job opportunities from ElixirConf EU alone (it was a virtual event, so the ticket was cheap).